If like us you are being bombarded by telephone calls from companies selling 20 thousand social media bookmarks, or social media campaign management or social media monitoring  packages then you’ll understand. They’re as annoying as those vuvuzelas every body’s complaining about that are ruining the world cup.

So what should you be on the lookout for?

Basically, if they do manage to get through your switchboard or past your receptionist then listen for the buzz of people in the background – it’s a sure sign of a call centre.

Social media bookmarking offers

The typical first lines will be

“would you like 20,000 social bookmarks to sites like Digg, technorati”

“we guarantee to get you on the front page of Googele with our social media packages”

Getting social media bookmarks and links in vast quatities like this means spamming the social media sites and this is frowned upon both by the social media websites and search engines.

The methods used to get thousands of such links involves automiatic submissions programmes that submit under false accounts. The accounts themselves may have been generated automaically or have been created by people slave labour call centres in 3rd world countries.

Social media monitoring offers

Whilst these aren’t scams we’d strongly advise wasting any money purchasing such tools and offers. We’ve had numerous calls in the past few weeks from companies selling social media monitoring packages. There are numerous free packages that do the job every bit as good as some of these “branded” packages.

Have you been called by the latest scammers? If so we’d love to hear your story.

Fill in our comment form below.

Redesigning your website won’t make you more money.

Spending thousands of pounds on redesigning your website won’t make you more money or convert more customers unless you test the impact. Products that go on supermarket shelves always go through market testing so what makes you think a website redesign is any different? People have different tastes and you may put off more people than you attract, so don’t risk it for the sake of vanity.

Don’t believe everything a web design company tells you.

Most web design companies selling redesigns aren’t interested in the bigger picture, such as your search engine optimisation or your long term marketing strategy – they’re only interested in making money from a redesign. Their sales staff work on a commission basis, and their designers will almost always push one of their designs rather than a design that will attract new customers and enquiries, so bear this in mind before you fork out expensive design fees.

Learn from the mistakes of others – a true story!

A client contracted a web design company to redesign their website but it had disastrous consequences, which saw their site drop from the search engines and all their enquiries disappear over the course of a single week. The web design company responsible for the redesign had replaced the clients’ website with a “Joomla” based content management system, renaming their existing pages and removing all of the on page optimisation they had done previously. The bill for redesign cost £4500 with the client losing £3000 in online sales over the same week. On top of this, the client had to launch an emergency adwords campaign of £2000 to cover the period where the site dropped from the rankings leaving them out of pocket by £9500. Even after the original site was reinstated their rankings took over 4 weeks to reappear in the search engines, during which, the company lost several thousand pounds in online sales.

Note: 40% of all our new clients who came to us in 2009 describing drops in enquiries and sales were as a direct result of their websites being redesigned.

The moral of the story is this;  if you have an existing business website that earns you enquiries and sales, then do not redesign until you have assessed what you could lose!

Tweak your way to success with conversion optimisation and split testing.

Tweaking your website with small changes over a few months is far safer and can save you thousands of pounds in design fees and lost sales. This method is known as conversion optimisation. It involves making small changes such as changing the colour of a button, adding a form, changing page header and asking asomething the right way.

Read about how conversion optimisation is done.

Each time a change is made, the effects on orders and sales are measured in a process called split testing. The best performing changes are kept and the process begins again; increasing your sales!

After a few months your site will have changed from what it was into something new and beautiful that makes you more sales. Best of all the small changes are very cheap to achieve.

If you want to know more about conversion optimisation then give us a call.

The new interface now sports a number of new features such as 3d form buttons, a left hand side bar, highlighting and graphical icons to name but a few.

The new interface however, does not seem to have surfaced across the globe yet. We’re seeing it in our Edinburgh office but not in our London office. Reports from clients accross the country are mixed with some seeing it and others still experiencing the old inteface in search.

One thing that is common is that it is only appearing on IE browsers. We have “straw polled” our clients and none are seeing it on any of the other browsers so this may point to Google doing some kind of split testing on IE before rolling it out to the rest of the browsers.

Reaction from those of our clients who are currently seeing the new interface is a unanimous thumbs down. Features such as the radio buttons to switch bewteen pages from the web and pages from the UK has been replaced by a text link nested in the left hand sidebar. All clients made reference to this new change and we also have to agree that it was much simpler to click the radio button on the classic version.

On the whole our clients have said that navigating round the new GUI is much less intuitive, frustrating and slower.

New Google Sidebar

The new sidebar now shows highlighting, icons and serveral “sort by” features giving the user several ways to find more accurate results but are they actually making life any better for the searcher?

To our eye, it seems like a poorly designed database interface. Sort by filters are commonly placed on top of columns such as those in a spreadsheets or highly visible forms on a web page, so it’s a little puzzling to us why these would be hidden in a collapsible section of the sidebar. It kind of defeats the purpose and we’re not alone in our opinion as our straw poll indicated.

Interestingly, when you look at such things from Google, it’s easy to not see the wood for the trees and clients can surprise you with the simplest of comments. For example, first impression feedback we received from a few clients was highly supicious of the new changes, citing that the new Google GUI was designed to keep people on the site longer so that more people would click on the sponsored links. No doubt, conpsriacy theorists will agree with such observations and this may turn out to be true in time. Certainly, the perception of Adwords amongst the majority of our clients has been less than favourable of late. Many are blaming the unreliable results and the number of totally irrelevant USA/dot com sites appearing in UK search as a way to boost Google’s Adwords take up and they see the new interface as yet another way for Google to force businesses into going down this route..  Google do earn their revenue from advertising so maybe there’s a “debate-worthy” article on the back of this.

Other new changes include a localisation feature. Whilst this may be of use to many on a local search, the question is…will it have implications in search when seeking national or international companies to deal with or sell to? This is one area where we will be keeping a close eye on Google’s tinkering and we intend to conduct a few experiments to explore variations in search.

If it ain’t broke….

It’s obviously early days for Google’s new interface but no doubt many questions will arise as to why the change was needed at all. The classic Google GUI has stood the test of time and this is undoubtedly what has made Google so popular in the first place. Tinkering with interfaces, adding sidebars and complicating how we interact with Google in our opinion is the wrong thing to do. We just want search results and this new GUI seems very much like adding corners to a wheel.

As the saying goes….if it ain’t broke then don’t try and fix it!

Ok (I paused and thought)… I’ll politely try and explian that they are acually deliberate. But when I tried to offer an explantation, his rather rude response was that we were unproffessional and we were writing like call centres from other countries! He then continued to “educate” us briefly for a momento on SEO and we took his advice then ended the call politely and wished him luck in his quest for an SEO quote.

Needles to say, we, like every other industry, get these calls from times to time and in moist cases they come from individuals who tink they know better than a professional SEO company with 12 years track record and globally clients…but I digress!

Wot I tried to explian was that the misspellings are deliberates and form part of an advanced SEO testing technique that has proved time and time again to be successfully for many of our client’s websites. We are constantinople testing the pages of our website and include misspellings as prat of split tests or as pages on their own in order to measure the impact they may have on rakings. We use our own site to experiment and any successes we get, we pass on for the benefit of our clients.

These misspellings do not mean that we are unprofessional or “call centre-like” in our approachings. Far from it actually, because most so called SEOs haven’t got a clue when it comes to misspellings and wouldn’t know-how implement them in a solid SEO campaign.

Google accounts for over 10 million misspellings in search every single day. If you put this into context then that is a LOT of potential customers to mis if your website is grammattically correct and 100% free of such misspellings.

Google even provides misspellings in their keyword suggestion tool for adwords campagns. For example, two of our clients’’ we promote online are targetting keywords related to” accountancy” and “jewellery” and Google kindly provides us with common misspellings people are searching for every day.

For example…see these images from April 15th 2010 below.

As you can see clearly above, there are far too many people searching on these misspellings to ignore in an SEO campaign.
SEO on the page is about optimizing your web pages for key phrases that people are actually searching for. People misspell words evry minute of every day so do we ignore these and miss out on a large number of potential clients? Obviously not, but it has to be crafted carefully and precisely into any SEO or PPC campaign. It’s not just a simple case of misspelling words and throwing them on your pages for the sake of it. Reasearch and discovery of these misspellings need to be undertaken so that they can be optimised into your pages the same way you would optimise any correctly spelt version of your content.

There are many ways to identify misspellings which can be implemented into your website. These can be obtained from Google’s adwords tool, your analytics, misspelling generators or even by trial and error. Web pages on the whole are “skim read” by the vast majority of visitors and it’s very rare that someone will read every word on every page of your site, so you can quite easily afford to dot the odd misspelling here and there and measure the results.

Want to talk about misspellings opportunities for getting more visitors? Give us a call or fill in our form.
Disclaimer: This page was spell checked by a Cray II computer operator on the planet Venus.

Search Engines are the first port of call for almost everyone who uses the internet whether it be conventional computer based access or via a mobile device such as an iPhone, or Blackberry. Mobile device users will be searching for your products and services in the same way that someone sat in front of a computer does.Your company should take this into account when you look to the internet for new business and steer your efforts towards meeting the needs of every type of online visitor possible.

Maximising your online visibility profile ensures the best possible chance to make your online business a success and depending on the nature of your business, and what you sell, your profile should include most (or all) of the following;

1. Relevant, content rich website
2. Found on search engines
3. Mailing list
4. PPC adverts pointing to your sales landing pages
5. Online PR
6. Articles on your products, services such as top 10 tips, faqs etc
7. Social media stuff like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace
8. Google merchant centre account for free product listings
9. A blog
10. RSS Feed
11. A forum
12. Videos (youtube, metacafe etc)
13. Local listing
14. Mobile device friendly alternative website

Relevant Content Rich Website

Unique relevant content on your website is attractive to search engines, meaning you can be found in searches. Unique relevant content also makes it good for your visitors to make informed decisions about your products and services. Unique relevant content is attractive to other website owners encouraging them to place links back to your website increasing your visibility further.

Be found on Search Engines (SEO)

Being found on Search Engines is crucial to getting new visitors and customers. You must perform SEO on your web pages as well as build links to your important pages.

Mailing list

Every time someone visits your website, offer them a way to subscribe to your mailing list. Every time someone places an order with you, offer them a way to join your list and be kept up to date with new products, special offers or tips on how to use your products. Offer your customers every opportunity to join your list and be kept up to date on everything your offer or sell. Offer them a way to recommend a friend.

PPC (paid advertising)

Paid advertising gets customers actively looking to buy your products and services. Learn as much as you can from data you gather about successful sales techniques and apply these to your organic pages. Watch market trends, peaks etc and advertise during seasonal periods such as Easter and Christmas. Watch out for sporting events, news articles or anything that may give you an opportunity to sell products and services during these times.

Online PR

Your online PR is a wonderful method to increase your visibilty and make potential customers aware of your products and services. Regular press releases can increase your visibilty far and wide.

Articles

Write articles and place them on your site. Articles are excellent sources of content for search engines, searchers and potantial customers. Submit versions of your articles to some of the popular article directories. Links to your website from articles can help your rankings. A good quality article can attract a potential customer.

Social Media

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can put your products and services in front of specific groups ready to purchase your products and services. Twitter can be useful for broadcasting special offers.

Google Merchant

Upload your products to Google Merchant Centre regularly. Google lists your products for free in their product search and your products can appear in blended results on the first page of Google results. These listings are often percieved by customers as a “recommendation” from Google.

Get a blog on your site

A blog is a fantastic way to produce regular content and comment. Post regularly with new information and articles about your products and services. Post opinions, news, topics on everything your offer. Blogs attract links and are attarctive to search engines.

RSS Feed

Get an RSS feed installed on your website. Potantial customers can subscribe to your feed and be kept up to date with your products and services.

Create a forum

If you offer products or services that you can create discussion around then install a forum. Your forum can be a valuable source for building a community, building a list of potential customers and making your company an online authority in your marketplace.

Videos

Post videos of your products and services on video websites like Youtube, MetaCafe etc. Make your videos informitive, instructional, saleslike or wacky. Your videos can be cited as good sources of information or go viral increasing your company’s online visbility dramatically.

Local listing

A local listing is essential if you only operate in a certain geographical area. Even if you operate globally your staelite offices will benefit from a local listing. Mobile device searchers will regularly search for local companies to meet their needs.

Mobile friendly website

Install a mobile device friendly version of your website. Mobile device users are set to expend rapidly in the next few years so you should provide an alternative version of your site so that your pages can be easily accessed on mobile phones.

Execair Charter  – based in London, Edinburgh and Palma came to us in the summer of 2009 looking to improve their Google rankings and take more enquiries from their website. We soon got down to work, analysing,  improving and optimising, and after 6 months we were ranking at the top of Google, outperforming their rivals and getting them lots of new enquiries. In fact we did such a good job that their main rival offered to buy them over and retaing our SEO Services in London & Edinburgh!

Cloud 9 International is an global private jet charter company, flying private individuals all over the globe. Founded by businessman Andy Mason and ex-footballer Graeme Souness, it  brokers private chartered flights for a wide variety of clients ranging from Hollywood actors like Kevin Costner to private groups jetting off on holiday, to sports events and concerts.

Over the coming months we will be working on several very exciting campaigns and who knows…we might even get to meet some celebrities in the process!

Successful SEO Services breeds success!

Our SEO Services and the successes they deliver for our clients are amongst our greatest achievements, and this is the second time in as many years where our client has been bought over by a rival firm. In 2008 one of our clients whom we’d been working with for 3 years, outranked and outperformed all their main competitors on the search engines. Their online success drew the attention of the much larger rival firm and a few months later the companies merged. Obviously, our services played a significant part in the process and we are delighted that the merged companies continue to go from strength to strength.

We have a proven track record of delivering top results for clients across many business sectors and we would be delighted if you would like to discuss a strategy for improving your online business. Contact us online or give us a call on:

London  – 020 8133 3219

or

Edinburgh – 0131 226 8159

Recently we picked up a few new clients who had been utilising the services of some “big SEO agencies” and “self proclaimed SEO experts”, however, let’s just say that these SEOs fell short on their promises of delivery.  Now, whilst we’re delighted to have picked up the new work, we were equally surprised (shocked even) at the quality of what was given to the client for to absorb.

Whenever we do something for a client, we do it throroughly and explain things simply. From building links, to ranking reports, to keyword research, right through to website analysis – it is all done with the greatest attention to detail, and it’s because of this that we regularly outperform our competitors. Recently however, we’ve been left speechless at some of the reports delivered to clients and the huge fees that accompanied them.

You see, the whole point of website analysis is not understood by a considerable number of SEO companies and in far too many cases analysis is packaged in such a way to bamboozle the client, justify huge fees and the SEO company does very little work. Clients are told that fees are justified by the time taken to report on what is happening or to delve deeper into the data to pinpoint where people are clicking and what phrases they are using.  Once that’s done the analysis report is sent  to the client (accompanied by the huge fee) and as Gordon Ramsay would say….done!

Actually, it’s not “done” in any sense of the word and let’s explain:

Take this example of website analysis our client was sent from their previous SEO company.

Analysis report for “Client www.mywebsite.com” by Big Ticket SEO Agency

Web traffic was up 7.4%….
Top key phrases “blue widgets”…
Bounce rate remained constant at 65%…
72% of visitors came from Google….
22% of traffic generated from PPC….

Blah…graphs

Blah…more graphs

Blah…pie charts

In all 12 pages of graphs, facts and figures.

Look familiar? If it does, and this is what your SEO company is charging you for every month then STOP!!! Take a step back and look at what you’ve actually been given and more importantly, what you’re going to do with it.

You see…what you’ve just paid for is not analysis at all – it’s a report – plain and simple. It may look impressive with all the graphs, percentages, bounce rates etc. It may tell you that you’ve had 10,000 visitors and your traffic has increased by 5%, but at the end of the day it’s just a report, and unless you know what to do with it you’d be as well throwing your money in the bin!

Analysis is a not a report

Analysis is about interrogating and evaluating website data, identifying failures and successes. It’s about asking questions and suggesting methods for improvement. Analysis is all about going forward and implemeting changes, washing, rinsing and repeating. Remember – analysis is not a report.

What is website analysis?

Website analysis in it’s simplest form is looking at the data from a previous month, determining where things have went right(or wrong) and making suggestions from experience, skill etc., in order to make improvements for future month(s).

There are many reporting tools that help in analysis such as Google’s Analytics, Heatmaps, List data, Server logs, split testing and PPC control panels. These tools provide a multitude of data to take forward into analysis.

An example website analysis would look like the following:

Data Report

Web traffic  up 7.4%….
Top key phrases “blue widgets”…
Bounce rate remained constant at 65%…
72% of visitors came from Google….
22% of traffic generated from PPC….

Findings from previous month

The changes made in sections x of the home pages and three landing pages had a mixed effect. Scroll lengths were improved enticing visitors to read more. Paragraphs were shortened which kept the visitor engaged. Interspersed in these were calls to action both in web copy and sidebar forms/imagery. There was a negative effect noticed in the split when the sign up form was changed from green to red.

Questions

Q. How many clicked on our special offer call to action?
Q. How many did not? Would it improve click throughs if the call to action text was changed to bold?
Q. How many arrived from

• Google
• Yahoo

Q. Does Yahoo perform better in sales than Google for the same phrase?
Q. How many visitors were from organic versus paid search and should more be spent on organic?
Q. How far did visitors scroll down the page?
Q. How do click clusters compare on visitor volume to page?
Q. Conversions are down on page x – is this seasonal influences?
Q. Which calls to action are failing/performing best?
Q. What improvements can be made to influence higher click through rates to deep pages .
Q. Did long copy pages outperform short copy pages on split tests?

Deliverables

1. Set splits up to measure impact of bold versus colour font variations in calls to action
2. Move forms up above fold
3. Change telephone number to text from image to display as skype anchor
4. Test questions in H1 tags over statements and measure effect
5. etc……

The above gives you some idea of what true website analysis really is and becomes useful to the client. This is much more useful because;

1. The client can see progress and ways forward
2. The client can make sense of the graphs and terminology
3. The client/SEO can learn from successes and failures
4. The SEO company demosntrates their expertise
5. The SEO company can improve the performance of the site

Conclusion

Your website analysis report should contain recommendations, questions, deliverables and explanations of previous actions in addition to statistics data.

If it contains only data, graphs and statistics etc., then we’d strongly recommend you question your SEO Company. Analytics packages can produce these reports in seconds so don’t be fooled if you’re charged large fees for this type of service.

Whilst it’s no secret that there will be a change in 2010, these changes will hardly be noticeable by users but the wave of over reaction prompted by some SEOs will certainly cause confusion amongst companies looking to source a reputable SEO Company.

The simple fact is that no one except Google knows what the update will do and you cannot prepare for it.

The only preparation you can do is to protect yourself against SEOs offering to optimise your site for the new update – these will be the same companies who blame the caffeine update when your rankings disappear after they make these contrived changes to your site.

Google’s Matt Cutts quite clearly tells us that the users won’t be able to tell the difference and even those who tested out the public test site hardly noticed any difference in results. See for yourself in Matt Cutt’s video below.

Beware the SEO soothsayers and self proclaimed experts!

If the Florida Update is anything to go by then it’s safe to assume that Google have well and truly learned their lesson from it. However, and despite assurances from them since, some respected(?) SEOs still insist upon wreaking havoc by making wild predictions about what will happen every time Google announces an update. Take the wild predictions made by Bruce Clay in his infamous Ranking is dead in 2009 video last year.  Amongst these was the prediction that if the top 10 sites don’t have video on their pages then they could lose their rankings overnight. His predictions were wrong of course and he later went on to blame them on a “large beer” in this video, however the fact remains that countless SEOs sold his concepts to unsuspecting clients and videos started appearing on every site you could find.

Did those sites without video lose their rankings overnight? Of course not.

We read about this nonsense every day and the “experts” all predict that rankings will disappear everytime Google announces an update. Most of these predictions are based on articles that other “experts” have written which are then re spun in such a way that it causes panic/buzz and everyone has to do something about it – often with adverse results.

If it doesn’t come from Google then don’t believe everything these self proclaimed experts tell you.

There are no new ways to get on top of the search engines, there’s no secret sauce and there’s no inside information. All the soothsayers convinced us that rankings would turn upside down in 2009 but they didn’t.

Ranking in 2009 is very much alive and all those that continued ranking pages using tried and trusted methods (like ourselves) are the ones that outperformed everyone else.

The prime factor for ranking on Google before the Caffeine update was links, it still is links and probably will always be links for years to come.

SEO companies who don’t keep up to date with changes over at Google could receive a nasty shock come the start of the new year. 

Announced in August of this year, Caffeine has been available for public testing on Google’s sandbox website but it was replaced yesterday with a  notice informing the world that it will be going live soon.

Google claim the new version is faster, more accurate and produces more relevant results but many webmasters have who have witnessed rankings drops in the new Caffeine test site are concerened about drops in rankings.  Moreover, the timing of the news is already causing a stir among many site owners concerned about  potential loss of sales from rankings drops, especially just before the Christmas sales period.

Could this be a potential sales catastrophy?

Google certainly has a history of causing mass panic amongst online retailers when it makes these changes and you only need to look back at the catastrophy caused by the Florida Update in 2003 however, it’s safe to assume  there won’t be any repeat. Google’s Matt Cutts assures us in his blog that the roll out will not begin until January so online retailers can relax – for the present.

Winners and losers.

Whilst we all look forward to better more relevant results, there can be no doubt that there will be some winners and losers when the new version is rolled out.

If you’ve been monitoring your rankings between Caffeine vs Google then chances are that you have noticed some differences between the two sets of results.

Interesting times ahead!